Human-Animal Relations: The Ontological Turn and the Return of Humanism

Abstract

This article considers the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and human-animal ethnographies from a humanist standpoint. It presents the animal turn with much sympathy as a genuine Gestalt-shift and follows some anthropologists in the field and in the blasted landscapes of the Anthropocene. It considers the ontological turn as a return to phenomenology and, without giving up anthropocentrism, it defends an enlarged humanism to deal with the ecological crisis.